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28 April 2022

Selected Fakemarks

One common literary convention in a variety of fictional settings, but especially webcomics and anime, is to avoid depicting real trademarks, to avoid promoting real companies and to avoid any claim of trademark infringement (even though "nominal use" of this type would almost never actually be infringing). 

But trademarked products are pervasive in daily life, so any reasonably realistic work of fiction in a modern setting needs to reflect this reality. This is often done with what I call "fakemarks" that may echo a real world trademark or trade name or famous title of a fictional work, or may be entirely original, for products in the fictional world depicted. Some are wry satire, others are simply phonetically or visually similar, or tweak a semantic concept in the original.

I have collected a number of examples of them, which I present below.
















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